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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare’s works, it may be doubted whether Benson depended on Thorpe’s printed volume in his confused impression of the sonnets.¹ The word ‘sonnets’, which loomed so large in Thorpe’s edition, finds no place in Benson’s. In the title-pages, in the head-lines, and in the publisher’s ‘Advertisement’, Benson calls the contents ‘poems’ or ‘lines’. He avows no knowledge of ‘Shakespeares Sonnets’. Thorpe’s dedication to Mr. W. H. is ignored. The order in which Thorpe printed the sonnets is disregarded. Benson presents his ‘poems’ in a wholly different sequence, and denies them unity of meaning. He offers them to his readers as a series of detached compositions. At times he runs more than one together, without break. But on each detachment he bestows an independent descriptive heading. The variations from Thorpe’s text, though not for the most part of great importance, are numerous.
The separate titles given by Benson to the detached sonnets represent all the poems save three or four to be addressed to a woman. For example, that which Thorpe numbered CXXII is entitled by Benson, ‘Vpon the receit of a Table Booke from his Mistris,’ and that which Thorpe numbered CXXV is headed, ‘An intreatie for her acceptance.’ A word of the text is occasionally changed in order to bring it into accord with the difference of sex. In Sonnet CIV. 1, Benson reads ‘faire love’ instead of Thorpe’s ‘faire friend’, and in CVIII. 5, ‘sweet love’ for Thorpe’s ‘sweet boy’.
¹ Benson’s preface ‘To the Reader’ is not very clearly phrased, but he gives no indication that the poems, which he now offers his public, were reprinted from any existing publication. His opening words run:—
‘I here presume (under favour) to present to your view, some excellent and sweetely composed Poems, of Master William Shakespeare, Which in themselves appeare of the same purity, [as those which] the Authour himselfe then living avouched; they had not the fortune by reason of their Infancie in his death, to have the due accomodatio of proportionable glory, with the rest
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